Horrific stories of child sex abuse in European nations and elsewhere continue to dominate headlines from a variety of perspectives. Some blame clashes of mutually alien cultures where children fall victim to these social trends while others blame a culture of vulgarity and a libertine mentality among wider society. Others yet blame a poor allocation of law enforcement resources as well as a cultural attitude that tends to disregard the often poorly articulated claims of traumatised child victims.

There is likely an element of truth to each of these various theories, but one explanation for the prevalence of abused children that has yet to be explored is the culture of corporate blackmail which is rife in neo-liberal societies. This goes a long way towards explaining the prevalence of child abusers in elite positions within many western societies.

Corporate culture in many western societies is one in which many forms of deviant practices ranging from adultery to illegal drug use are as common among elites as a the cigarette break and occasional trip to the bar with friends and co-workers is for ordinary working people. Against this background, a culture of vice emerges wherein everybody tends to inevitably learn the embarrassing secrets of one’s peers, superiors or underlings. Perhaps interestingly, there is often little done to conceal these embarrassing secrets and there is in fact a reason behind this. It is as if, knowing the secrets of others is an intended development in such elite work places so as to foster an atmosphere where it is widely known that everyone can blackmail everyone else – a kind of psychological version of the mutually assured destruction doctrine of the Cold War.

Whistle-blowers are brave individuals who feel the need to speak out against breaches of law, ethics and morals in situations where others believe it would be materially beneficial to keep one’s mouth shut. In order to avoid having a whistle blower in one’s midst, it often becomes strategically necessary for a deviant individual with embarrassing or disgusting secrets to hide, to surround him or herself with others who have similar embarrassing or disgusting secrets to hide. The reason for this is simple. If one contemplates becoming a whistle-blower in such an environment, there exists at minimum, an implied threat of blackmail against someone who blows the whistle. In order words “if you reveal one of my embarrassing secret’s – I will reveal one of yours”.

As a result, it becomes perversely necessary for corporate bodies to hire individuals based less on their objective merits but based on having personalities and lifestyles that are similar to the others in the organisation in order to create a level blackmailing ‘playing field’ that would otherwise be more difficult if one looked for the best qualities in an employee or business partner that one would look for in an environment where moral degeneracy was otherwise exorcised from the body politic.

In this sense, business environments that ought to be meritocratic are in fact incubators of mediocrity as it becomes more beneficial for elites with terrible secrets to hide to surround themselves with fellow flawed men and women than with people who could perform the best tasks in a business environment, even if they are morally upstanding individuals and therefore less susceptible to blackmail as they have the least to hide.

This explains why in Asian societies where there is often a legal element to enforcing morality, there are often fewer instances of child sex abuse than in more legally laid back Europe and North America. It also explains that when strong deterrents to immoral behaviour exist such as they do in China or Singapore in the forms of harsh punishments for ethical/moral violations, one can develop workplace environments where no one has any secrets to hide, because having such secrets which eventually tend to slip out – one would find him or herself in a much bigger heap of justified trouble than in western societies that often take a worrying casual approach to both child abuse and a narcotics based lifestyle.

In trying to tackle one of the worst crimes imaginable – those committed against children, it becomes necessary to examine all of the potential places from which an environment of looking the other way in the face of abject criminality foments. The culture of corporate blackmail therefore most be fully examined in order to end cycles of duplicity which can lead to genuine victims having to cope with their pain without any possibility of receiving genuine justice.